


all i am (all that i was ever meant to be)

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 23:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2751644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jesse is enroute to his future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all i am (all that i was ever meant to be)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Domingo Ocelot (docelot)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/docelot/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I do not own Breaking Bad, and I don't make any money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title is from "The Wall" by Kansas.

Dark, light, dark. Jesse tried to make sense of the different colors that seemed to be floating around in his eyes. It had been dark for so long that he didn’t know anymore what brightness looked like, felt like. There were floaters in front of his eyes, little bursts of yellow and green and white. Always white.

He was driving, and he was yelling, and he couldn’t tell exactly what he was yelling. He fell asleep and awoke in the same second, his hands in the air or on the steering wheel or suspended in between. He had never been this tired before. Maybe freedom was too heavy. Maybe in some ways it had been easier when he’d been chained up and had no choices, back when the days simply consisted of waking up, cooking, and going back to the grate to sleep on his tiny mattress and wait for the days to one day end, one way or another.

Now there was this blur of possibility and it was blinding him. 

When he ran out of gas, he didn’t dare stop at a gas station. Wherever he was, he was too close. He’d get spotted. But he didn’t have many other options. Did the cops, if they were still tailing him, know about the car? He wasn’t sure.

Maybe no one was out looking for him, and maybe that was scarier. Then he wasn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar and maybe that… maybe that meant that he wasn’t even real.

He hopped out of the car near Amarillo and started walking, eventually coming to a Greyhound station. If he hadn’t wanted to go to a gas station for fear of being recognized, wasn’t getting on a bus a much worse option?

But maybe Jesse just didn’t care anymore, and maybe he just wanted to be around people at last. It had been hours since he’d seen another human being, and he still wasn’t completely sure if Mr. White, or Walt, or whoever the hell he was, even counted as one of those.

There were a lot of people at the Greyhound station – some were outside of it, slumped against the place where the metal under the windows jutted out towards the parking lot, and some were inside, peeking out the windows, maybe waiting for a cab or maybe just killing time.

There was a strange peace to it as Jesse walked towards it; he felt as if he were hovering in mid-air. 

There had been some money in the glove compartment, about two hundred wrinkled dollars. He didn’t really want to think about where it had come from. Maybe from Mr. White’s stash or maybe from some stick-up Jack’s crew had done. Either way it was blood money.

But maybe it was all blood money in the end. 

He shuffled through the door and scuffed his sneakers against the tile, looking down at the floor, not wanting to be seen. Not wanting someone to catch a glimpse of his face for that second too long and realize who he was.

When he got up to the ticket kiosk, he hit the button for Baltimore because it was the first city to come to mind. He slid his crumpled up bills into the metal slot and typed a fake name (“Tom Smith” seemed innocuous enough); the machine split out a long white piece of cardboard and Jesse picked it up from the floor. The bus would be leaving in an hour.

He stumbled as if drunk to a bench made out of metal and painted blue, sitting as far away as possible from the other passengers, as if simply being near him might infect them somehow.

His leg kept twitching, like he couldn’t stand to be there, like he needed to be somewhere else and quick, needed to be on the bus. It wasn’t as if he wanted to be anywhere in particular, just not there. It wasn’t safe. Too many people could see him, too many people could bore their eyes into his soul, see behind his eyes and see the things that he’d done.

They would all know it all. 

There was a machine behind him, and it kept playing majestic music of the incredibly obnoxious sort, like it was meant to introduce a king or something. The machine’s mechanical voice would then announce, “There’s no limit to what you can win!” and play some more music. It must have played five times in a row as Jesse waited over there, but each time it managed to scare the wits out of him, and he curled in on himself a little bit more.

“Now bordering Gate 3 to St. Louis,” announced a voice, and Jesse jumped up, eager to be anywhere that wasn’t here, on this bench, being taunted by what was probably just a stupid claw machine. Nothing could just be what it was anymore.

He got in line, and began to twitch again. The line seemed to be moving so slowly. A man was asking him for his ticket but he’d forgotten where he put it. Everything was on pause as he searched. He heard the man behind him let out an exasperated sigh and then finally there it was, poking out of his pocket. The edge of the paper scratched against his palm and it hurt. Even paper hurt him now.

Jesse’s ticket fell out of his hands before he managed to hand it to the man, who gave him a look before adding his ticket to a stack of other tickets, a stack of people escaping from things.

The line was moving now and Jesse took slow steps forward to climb on to the bus. When he got on, he went all the way to the back, picking a window seat in the row in front of the bathroom. It wasn’t like the smell would bother him – not now at least, not after six months of the grate, of the cage.

There was a lot of waiting, and a lot of twitching. Jesse breathed in a sigh of relief when the doors shut and no one had tried to sit next to him. He couldn’t be boxed in like that, couldn’t be trapped again. He knew if someone tried he would freak out, but he didn’t know what form that would take, didn’t want to know. Because it might be something that resulted in getting him Found, found with a capital F, by any of the people who might be looking. The police might be a relief. Because what if it wasn’t the cops that found him, it could be some other guys from Jack’s crew, come looking for revenge. They might take him back.

The bus started to pull out, and no one seemed to take much notice of Jesse one way or another. Maybe he could rest his eyes for just a moment. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

***

When the driver announced, “Elk City,” Jesse awoke to find his lips pressed against the dirty window and a hell of a crick in his neck. He pulled himself up to lie against the seat. 

“There will be a twenty-five minute layover,” the man drawled. “If this ain’t your stop, don’t get lost, because we will leave without you. Have a good break.”

Jesse found himself shuffled out the front door of the bus, looking around at all of the people milling about. He looked around him – everything was flat, and next to the station was a lonely looking gas station painted in falsely bright red and white. 

He wandered inside the station to find some blue chairs next to a dusty radiator and a couple of college kids who had plugged in their phones in various out-of-the-way outlets.

A few people turned and looked his way, some of whom then looked away and others who curled up their noses in disgust. He must look like hell and smell worse… he should get to a shower as soon as he could. It’s not like they would have a shower in the bus terminal. Though, Jesse thought to himself, they probably should. A lot of the people on the benches looked just as disheveled as him.

“All right!” a voice announced, “We’re boarding again! St. Louis!”

Jesse looked sadly at the drinks counter. He wished he’d had enough to get some water, but if he didn’t preserve his money he didn’t know what he would do when he finally got to Baltimore. He needed some kind of reserve.

The door opened and a thin, short brown-haired woman slipped into the terminal, holding a baby.

“I didn’t miss the St. Louis one, did I?” she slurred, then looked at Jesse. “St. Louis? This St. Louis?”

Jesse nodded. He didn’t think he had actually spoken to another human being since he’d been talking to Mr. White back at the compound, if he counted. He wasn’t sure he knew how. He hadn’t talked much at the compound, gone months without saying anything in fact because no matter what he’d said, it didn’t matter. They just did what they were going to do anyway. He had given up and just gotten fed when he’d gotten fed, worked when they wanted him to work, and slept when they let him speak.

His throat was raspy.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, “This is the bus to St. Louis.”

“Ah, good,” the woman said, cracking the gum she was chewing, “Thought I was almost too late.”

“St. Louis!” the man announced again, “Hurry it up! We’re gon’ be late.”

Jesse moved back on to the bus, watching people load their bags and wishing they could just get on the road again already. He wasn’t even to St. Louis yet, let alone Baltimore, and he had already tired of traveling as much as he had of staying in one place. 

The uneasiness wouldn’t ever go, he thought, but that wasn’t the way to think because if he thought that way then why not just lie down in front of the bus or something drastic like that? And if he was going to do something drastic like that, why even escape the compound at all?

No, he had to keep moving because there had to be something for him somewhere.

He just didn’t know where that would be. 

His heart hurt as he lay his head against the window, staring out at the world as he left it, left this world at least. The world of Elk City. He didn’t know much about it, and that seemed a shame. For it had touched him in this small way, during his exit. His exit tour, his farewell tour. 

The woman with the baby sat down beside him, chomping her gum still.

“Thank gawd we’re starting. Last bus ride it took for-ev-or.”

Jesse raised an eyebrow. He didn’t want to say anything to her, and he really wished she would stop talking to him. He just wanted to sink into his seat and maybe just sleep. 

“Las’ time when I was getting on here, tryin’ to go, I was gonna go to Cali that time right, with my daughter – this is Jeanie, lil’ Jeanie like the song right – my ex named her, I wanted to call her Spring – it took like, ‘bout an hour to even get moving.”

Jesse looked at her. She seemed to be trying to talk faster than her tongue could get the words out. He’d seen that before. He’d been that before. 

“Hi,” he told her dryly.

“Hi,” she said, seeming to take that as an invitation. “Can’t wait to get outta Oklahoma. Social worker’s crawlin’ up my ass again. Gotta get, if you know what I mean. I can’t deal with this shit anymore. My mama used to tell me that some days you just gotta get up, and you just gotta go.” Her baby started to cry, and she began to rock her in a frenzied state. 

Jesse looked out the window. He wasn’t going to get any sleep for a while, yet.

***

They were in Oklahoma for a few hours more. Even through the window, all Jesse could smell was oil and cattle. Every ten to fifteen minutes, the baby would cry, and that would start the woman next to him talking to him again.

“I’m Allie by the way,” she slipped into one of her rants. Jesse had long since stopped being able to follow what it was about. “Short for Alberta. Was born in Canada. My mom was on vacation, y’know?”

“Oh,” Jesse told her. It was hard to follow. 

“I think Alberta’s a pretty ugly name, so nobody calls me it.” She smoothed a hand over her hair. “What about you? What’s your name?”

Jesse wondered briefly whether she was some DEA agent who just knew how to do a really good impression of a meth addict. He decided to play it safe.

“I’m Tom,” he said finally, using the name he’d given on the ticket.

“You don’t look like a Tom,” she told him, and turned around to stare at the aisle. “The road goes on forever, don’t it? Like you’re just floating through space. When it’s so dark like this, it’s light you’re a bird flying through a city that’s nothing but dark.”

And she was right. It had turned to evening at some point, and Jesse had missed it. Now it was nothing but pure black night.

***

It was still pitch black outside when they crossed into Missouri. The bus was lit only by the lightly flickering signs by the side of the road advertising spas and gas stations, and when they got to the Greyhound station of Joplin, it was so dead around them Jesse was sure that any sound he heard would be that of a ghost.

But which ghost? He’d encountered many in the past few years. He pictured Gale staring him down, asking him why, pictured Jane’s black hair draped over her shoulder as she gave him a knowing glance (she must’ve known all along), saw Andrea’s eyes boring holes in his soul as she reached out to him, even now. 

He wrapped his arms around himself. Even with the heat turned on, he was so cold.

Allie was sleeping with her baby in her arms. At least she wasn’t passed out or O.D.ing or something. There was that.

Jesse had the faint idea that he should call someone. She’d said a social worker was out looking for her.

But who would take a call from a man on the run, anyway?

***

When they got to St. Louis, she grabbed his arm.

“Listen, you look like you’ve been living pretty rough a while now. I’m going to my sister’s, and we don’t got much but… if you want… you look like somebody who don’t got much, either.”

Jesse looked at her, trying to blink the tears out of his eyes. He would have loved to go, just to be near someone. To be near anyone. He could earn his keep, try and make Allie stay away from the stuff, even take care of the baby. He’d do anything. He’d work hard. Hadn’t he worked hard before? 

But people around him had a tendency to end up dead. Even if the woman crashed and burned, it’d be better for her to do it alone.

“Listen,” Jesse whispered. “You… you say there’s people out looking for you. Maybe you ought to check in. But at least, keep… yourself together.”

He remembered the words he’d spoken to Andrea. He’d asked her what kind of mother she was. He couldn’t ask that question anymore. He wasn’t fit to judge anybody.

But he could plead. He’d gotten good at that.

“Please, just try and keep yourself together. Stay clean.”

Allie smiled shakily.

“Yeah, okay,” she told him. “I’ll try and keep outta trouble. It’s just… second chances ain’t easy to come by, are they… Tom?” 

Something in her look made him wonder if she recognized him. If so, he’d have to be far away from St. Louis by the time she told anyone else.

In an hour they’d be leaving for Baltimore, and he would be. 

Allie walked off, baby against her shoulder, heading towards a car outside of the station.

Jesse sat back down. Maybe he’d spend his last few dollars now.

He managed to buy a bottle of Poland Spring. He’d try and make it last.

***

It was hard to drink at first. His throat burned, and didn’t seem to want to accept it. Maybe his throat had a death wish. 

But the rest of him didn’t. Couldn’t. He’d have to make himself keep going, to hope that there was something at the end that he needed to find.

The water helped; he slept straight through to Illinois. He woke up to a heavyset African-American college kid playing Dragon Ball Z out loud on his laptop.

“Sorry, man,” the kid told him, looking at Jesse’s confused face. “Didn’t mean to wake you.” 

“It’s cool,” Jesse mumbled, rubbing his eyes. “Dragon Ball. Cool, man.” He craned his head in. “Mind if I watch?” 

The guy shrugged.

“Nah, it’s cool.” He smiled and gestured to the people sitting around him. “These are my friends who I just met on this bus.” He laughed. “Long ride, guess you get to know people. It’s like some kind of desert island. I’m Derek, first off.”

“I’m Ben,” said this lanky white guy with blonde hair. “I’m on my way to Basic at Fort Hayes.”

“And I’m Richie,” spoke up another white guy with long, sandy brown hair. He looked like he was high. In fact, he looked as if he’d never been anything but high. He reminded Jesse of Badger and Skinny Pete. Or Combo.

“I’m Tom,” Jesse murmured. The fake name was getting easier to tell people. It was a lot easier than telling people his name was Diesel or Mad Dog. 

“Well, hey man,” Richie said, “Where you headed?”

“Baltimore,” Jesse said quietly.

“I’m headed everywhere,” Richie said before Jesse could ask him. “I’m off to college next year and I bought this pass for 500 bucks where you get unlimited Greyhound travel for a month. I’m going from city to city, sleeping on the bus or as cheap a place as I can find. I’m off to Baltimore, too. I haven’t been, yet.”

“Neither have I,” Jesse admitted. 

“Sounds like you’re not going to somewhere, you’re going from somewhere,” Derek chimed in. Jesse shrugged.

“Isn’t everyone?” he asked noncommittally.

“You guys ever done shrooms?” Richie asked. Jesse didn’t answer, but both Derek and Ben shook their heads. “Don’t ever take a shower when you’re on ‘shrooms, man. I did that – I didn’t listen to what people told me, man, and I… I was trapped in a bubble world.”

Jesse laid his head on the shoulder of the seat and listened.

***

They each hopped off, except for Richie, before Pittsburgh. They changed to another bus at that station, though Jesse again felt the pull to go. Anywhere, he could go, and anywhere he wouldn’t potentially have someone following him.

“You know, man, you look like you’ve kinda had a time,” Richie told him again as he waited for the bus to Baltimore to board. “You could come with me. Maybe we could travel together or something. Even if what Derek said is true. Even if you’re running from something.” 

Jesse shrugged.

“Never said I was,” he told him in what he tried to make a nonchalant voice. “And it sounds interesting but I’ve got… I’ve got stuff.”

“Stuff,” Richie repeated. “Well… If you’re done with stuff, ever, and you want to… hang out or something…” He tossed Jesse a card with a twitter handle written on it.

“Thanks,” Jesse said without much conviction, “I’ll do that.” It would be nice to have a friend. But a friend is what he thought he’d seen in Mr. White, those days when they’d been out in the desert. The days they’d joked with each other. The day that Mr. White had held him in his arms while he’d cried. 

He was quiet the rest of the way to Baltimore.

***

“This stop, Baltimore.” Jesse slowly got out of the seat. Here he was. He was… could he call it home already? What would home be? Would he be living in motel rooms? On the street? In some kind of shelter? Would he have to keep moving if someone recognized him? Or maybe someone would recognize him right away, maybe someone had already called the cops already and they would be waiting for him, waiting to put up a headline about how they’d caught the second half of the evil meth-dealing duo.

“Listen man,” Richie told him. “If you change your mind, I’ll be staying in town a couple days.” 

Jesse nodded in a sort of daze. He walked out the door and down the steps, into the parking lot outside of the Baltimore Greyhound Station.

There’d be no more transfers. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life sitting on buses and listening to strangers’ conversations, talking about nothing. He’d have to look in the mirror and look at himself.

He was standing next to the station and he found he was staring at a wall.

He didn’t know if he could cross through it, see the other side of it.

If he kept walking, maybe he’d come to a bus. Maybe he’d come to a road. He didn’t know where it would take him. But each step was a step away from Albuquerque. A step away from the grave of Walter White. And maybe a step away from Jesse Pinkman and a step into the light.


End file.
